What triggers perceptions of racism in Heart of Darkness? A reader-response analysis

IF 0.6 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Language and Literature Pub Date : 2023-09-22 DOI:10.1177/09639470231202263

Lorenzo Mastropierro, Kathy Conklin

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This paper combines reader-response analysis and stylistic insights to investigate what may be triggering perceptions of racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It presents the results of a survey that asked participants to read extracts from the novel in which Africans are described and to highlight words and phrases they found problematic. Participants were then asked to answer some questions about their perception. Linking quantitative examination of the patterns emerging from participants’ highlighting with a qualitative analysis of participants’ answers, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of the linguistic features and structures that contribute to the perception of racism in Heart of Darkness. By doing so, this paper not only offers a novel perspective on the discussion about race and racism in Conrad’s canonical text, but it also provides further empirical evidence of the relationship between language and reader response.

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是什么触发了《黑暗之心》中的种族主义?读者反应分析

本文结合读者反应分析和文体见解来探讨约瑟夫·康拉德的《黑暗之心》中引发种族主义观念的原因。它展示了一项调查的结果，该调查要求参与者阅读小说中描述非洲人的节选，并指出他们认为有问题的单词和短语。然后，参与者被要求回答一些关于他们感知的问题。通过对参与者的回答进行定量分析和定性分析，本文提供了《黑暗的心》中种族主义认知的语言特征和结构的全面图景。通过这样做，本文不仅为康拉德经典文本中关于种族和种族主义的讨论提供了一个新颖的视角，而且还为语言与读者反应之间的关系提供了进一步的经验证据。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Language and Literature Multiple-

CiteScore

1.70

自引率

14.30%

发文量

期刊介绍： Language and Literature is an invaluable international peer-reviewed journal that covers the latest research in stylistics, defined as the study of style in literary and non-literary language. We publish theoretical, empirical and experimental research that aims to make a contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on readers. Topics covered by the journal include (but are not limited to) the following: the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, cognitive approaches to text comprehension, corpus and computational stylistics, the stylistic investigation of multimodal texts, pedagogical stylistics, the reading process, software development for stylistics, and real-world applications for stylistic analysis. We welcome articles that investigate the relationship between stylistics and other areas of linguistics, such as text linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation studies. We also encourage interdisciplinary submissions that explore the connections between stylistics and such cognate subjects and disciplines as psychology, literary studies, narratology, computer science and neuroscience. Language and Literature is essential reading for academics, teachers and students working in stylistics and related areas of language and literary studies.